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| ISSUE №193 · DEMAND GEN | AGENCY MARKETING |
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
When my now mid-20s son was a toddler, he would sometimes ask to be carried if we were walking somewhere. By the time he was 4, he had two younger sisters and often, there were no extra hands for carrying. So, when he started to motion to be picked up, and my arms were full of his sisters. I would start singing "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" and start marching.
Immediately, that little guy would start pumping his legs and swinging his arms and marching like he was in the Rose Bowl parade. Somehow, I had conditioned him to forget everything else and march when I started singing this ridiculous, repetitive song. It worked everywhere - the grocery store, walking around the neighborhood, at the beach - if he were tired, I would just have to start that song, and he was happily in motion.
I’m not sure exactly how I conditioned him… but it lasted for a long time…I remember when he was about 10, I randomly started singing John Jacob and he said, “Hey! I know that song. It makes me want to march…” I laughed and told him about his toddler affinity for marching to that song.
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What Conditioning Have You Foisted On Your Market?
Does anyone in the market know what you want them to do if you started singing "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt"?
Probably not.
This guy (I have no idea who he is) likely has conditioned the market to view his outreach as irrelevant and spammy:
I didn’t find his approach compelling…
The market is going to respond to what you deliver, and your delivery creates expectations. For instance, last Friday, I had the opportunity to run to a late-season Red Sox game, and I didn't have this newsletter finished, so there was no Friday edition.
I received four emails saying, "What? No Agency Inner Circle this week?" I clearly conditioned at least four people to expect this email on Friday afternoon.
Let’s Condition Your Market So That They Start Marching, Shall We?
There’s a few ways to think about conditioning your market… Mastering
Topical Authority: A a couple of weeks ago, I walked you through Common Thread Collective's agency positioning. In many respects, they've spent the last half dozen years refining the idea that marketing is a financial instrument, not a promotional instrument.
THIS IS THEIR TOPIC. They look at everything they do through this lens. As far as I know, there is no one in the e-commerce agency space that is more authoritative around the financial contribution of marketing than Common Thread.Broad Presence: There are people that are culturally ubiquitous. Nik Sharma is seemingly everywhere I look. He is in my inbox, my LinkedIn feed, my Twitter feed, and probably sometime soon, in my dreams. He focuses on owning the spaces where his target audience is going to be. He has taken a page from the Gary Vee playbook - best-selling books (I actually really liked “Day Trading Attention”), 5mm people on his YouTube channel, 12mm on his Instagram… he is a high-velocity content machine…his presence has transcended his marketing roots and spilled over into vaguely mainstream visibility and viability.
Narrow Presence: Ryan Alford gets about a million podcast listens a month. I listen to his podcast from time to time, but he hasn’t infected my algorithmic world outside of his podcast. I might just be missing it, but his 5 years of podcasts are incredibly deep, and in many respects, I think his narrow presence is increases the impact of his content.
Persistent Presence - Newsletters & Blogs: This is different than “narrow presence” because newsletters have a pretty long half life. As an example, just this morning, a new subscriber to this newsletter signed up after landing on Agencies Are Like Sharks - AIC #2 - written in May 2024, and somebody today, spent 3 minutes on my site reading 7 & Half Reasons Not To Start a Company - something I published in 2014!
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There Are Certainly Thousands of More Ways To Deliver Messages To Your Market…
We would be here until the end of time if I kept on thinking and enumerating different ways to grab your market's attention. The idea is, however, that you need to be consistently doing something and presenting it to relevant people in your market so that they can understand who you are, what you bring to the table, and whether or not they want to pay attention to you.
Failing the regular delivery of presence around a set of meaningful topics will bring you to The Quiet Place that I talked about in my Activities to Agency Business Functions series. Your message will inevitably change over time. Even the most consistent people, like Common Thread Collective, have evolved their message over time so that it reflects the circumstances around them, but at their core, they are talking about the same issues. In my long career in creating content, I have addressed a bunch of different topics, but they circle around the core ideas of positioning, sales, demand generation, lead generation, and, thankfully, Return on Understanding. (In fact, earlier this week, I caught up with someone whom I haven't spoken to in a decade, and he said that he reached out because he finally understood what ROU truly meant.)
Conditioning Takes Time
We are in an era of instant - send 10,000 emails a day, get seen by ChatGPT in 72 hours and running 100 different ad variations, hoping to find some data that tells you which one is the best one. But truth be told, all of those things that happen instantly are typically built on the back of things that you've done for a very long time.
So, to start conditioning your market, I really want you to start investigating and investing in those core messages and core beliefs that you have that you can espouse for a long time, so that when your market is sufficiently conditioned, the results will be immediate.
It's kind of funny, but they say usually an overnight success takes 15 years, and that is more true than false. The thing that makes the overnight success possible over those 15 years is being sure that what you are trying to condition your market with is powerful. There is a tipping point when your presence, your message, and your insistence on conditioning your market are so strong that, magically, the market responds to you.
It might take months and months to start conditioning your market, but once you do, everything after that gets amplified because the market is already listening for what you say.
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